


Knowledge

by Nickidemus



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 10:43:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1185309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nickidemus/pseuds/Nickidemus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon has been made Lord Commander, and now he's seeking guidance. What he finds is Ygritte.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knowledge

The Godswood where he'd made his vow still stood. Jon wanted that to warm him, that the old and familiar could linger so when the world had changed infinitely. Instead he was reminded of the fact that he hadn't had a prayer answered in... He wanted to think back to a time when a prayer had been answered, but in being crowned with leadership and losing Ygritte, so close together those things seemed merged in his mind, he seemed to remember only sent up pleas with no replies.

"Yet I do know there are ears that listen," he found himself murmuring into the cold silence, his breath curling from his mouth in a white puff. "Some I can never know or understand. Perhaps even more unknowable than these old gods of my father's." Then he felt instantly foolish, sighing and running a hand down his face. He shouldn't be here, indulging himself like this. He should be making important decisions, facing what lay ahead. Namely those walkers who would never stop unless he could rally a force against them.

"Trouble and toil on that long face," came a voice he was certain he wasn't hearing.

He stiffened. No, please, do not let her be some strange, new sort of enemy for him, some ugly trick the walkers have learned. "Ygritte," he said, and he feared so little these days, but he was afraid to turn toward that voice.

"Walkers don't have minds to make thoughts with, and they can't make those thoughts clear if they do," she pointed out. "I know that's what you're thinking. If I've said it once, Jon Snow, I've said it until I'm blue."

He turned to her then, unable to help the smile that crossed his lips, a smile he'd always saved for her. "I think I know what it might be."

She wore nothing, her red hair a tangled, lovely dress for her pale body. She didn't shiver. She didn't breathe the same vapor as him, because she didn't breathe. She had no essence, no substance, and yet he met flesh when he touched her. Her hair was warm when his hand moved to draw through it as if through water. She didn't feel like she had. She felt new. Remade and the woman he'd loved even still. She burned his mind with her contradictions, and she only smiled.

"So then tell me how much you know?" she asked, pressing in and making him forget there was any such thing as cold even surrounded by snow.

"Very little indeed," he murmured in return, his voice thick with love. Thick with that other thing, too. The one he'd discovered in her arms and felt now he would revisit again.

Ygritte peeled his clothes off as though they were made of the same frosty air he breathed, and when her arms circled him, there was nothing to feel but heat and belonging. He'd thought ghosts were cold, and he daren't say so, knowing he'd hear her typical, haughty rebuttal. Before, he'd not been so sure she knew more than him. She knew of a different world certainly, but she could never know all of his. Now he was entirely certain she knew all worlds and could put him to shame for speaking too freely.

And soon all was only sinking into her and answers to such trivial things no longer plagued him. She was a boiling fire inside, but she didn't burn. She was pressed into the snow, and didn't melt it. She cried out with her pleasure, and he could swear steam should issue from that pink, sweet tongue that he pressed such kisses over. Her nipples were pink embers, and his cock ran in and out of a fissure of opened, red-hot earth, and he should be seared alive, but he was brought more alive instead. Seeing every detail of her as their passion grew, as she moved hungrily beneath him and he above her.

He spilled inside her, expecting the sound of water against heated metal. He ran a trail with his tongue over her paleness in an attempt to make each moment stretch, to hold her there. She did linger, brushing at his hair with her fingers and singing old songs in his ear, for him alone so the notes didn't echo in the trees.

"I don't know if I am able to be what is wanted of me," he told her, his head against her breast. "I came here to pray for guidance. I want to remember my father, what he would do, to be honorable. I want to remember the battles I've fought, that I've come so far, what is left to fear? If you've come, then there must be wisdom in you for me. Tell me, Ygritte."

She touched his cheek. "Put on your clothes, or you'll turn to ice out here. That is all I know that could possibly matter, and it is why you know so little of what does, Jon Snow."

He dressed under her scrutiny and didn't recall seeing her leave, but she was gone. Her impossible fire that didn't burn. Her hair, he thought smilingly, that burned through her. And she had marked him with a brand, he realized, further than skin deep. On his heart.


End file.
